First of all, sorry for the bad quality of my pictures…

When I was living in France, I liked to eat this pastry, le mille-feuille. I remember though that it was difficult to eat, so it was nothing I bought like that, to eat on the street, more some dessert for the nice occasions. When Xmas came, I thought of which kind of dessert I wanted to eat and since I don’t like the traditional bûche de Noël, then, I decided to explore the mille-feuille.

The most difficult part of it is the puff pastry. I tried once before to make croissants and it worked pretty well. This time, it was a little bit more difficult, since the butter went through the pastry, so I had to repare it. I guess I had the luck of the beginner the first time. I made the pastry some weeks in advance and froze it. The day before xmas, it was time to make hte mille feuille, so I took my pastry off the freezer and here you see:

Time to make it really thin (afterwards I think I should have made it even thinner):

A good trick I discovered was that it was much more easier to thinner it on a plastic film instead of on the table with flour. Much more cleaner and easier to move and so. Definitivly something I will do more often! Then, I cut the pastry in 3 pieces, they were enormous but fit in my owen plates. ( I had more than 1 kg of pastry, which is much more than the pastry you can buy in shops and definitivly much more than in the video bellow, but we were 6 starving adults).

Time to cook each part of the pastry, individually. This part took a long time: I had to cook every layer once on each side during 10-20 minutes, so count by yourself: it takes time. Plus that it was kind of difficult to handle with them, since they were big. The result was like this:

Then, you let everything cool down and you make a vanilla cream. IT takes a little time to make, but it is not very difficult. You can find a good video for that with this link. When this is done, you just do as in the video bellow: one layer of pastry, one layer of vanilla cream, one layer of pastry, one layer of vanilla cream, one layer of pastry and you finish with icing sugar and decoration with cacao:

As you can see on the picture, our mille-feuille was enormous. The pastry plates were not really rectangles, that’s why it got this rounded egdes. The size of the mille-feuille made also that it wanted to slide apart. So a lesson for the future: reduce the size of your mille-feuille to the half on the one in the picture.

The decoration with the cacao were a little thick as well but we have to blame it on our bad cissors. Explanation: we used a freezong bag and cut a corner to let the cacao run through the hole and the hole was a little too big, because the cissors wouldn’t cut properly. We laughed at it and made the decoration with a glass (or two) of champagne in the stomach, so this is totally something we accept.

What’s about the taste: it got approved. Everyone ate his/hers part and another one the day after. The mille-feuille was even better after a night in the frigde. I was a little bit afraid that it would be all soft but not at all.

Conclusion: definitivly something I will do again!

You can find here every step well explained of the mille feuille:

(to flip the pastry was not that easy that on the video though).